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Caryl PhillipsCaryl Phillips
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Bibliography |
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Critical perspective
Author statement |
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Biography
Caryl Phillips was born on 13 March 1958 on the Caribbean island of St Kitts. He grew up in Leeds, England, and read English at Queen's College, Oxford. He is the author of six novels, several books of non-fiction and has written for film, theatre, radio and television. Much of his writing - both fiction and non-fiction - has focused on the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences for the African Diaspora.
The Final Passage (1985), his first novel, won the Malcolm X Prize for Literature. It tells the story of a young woman who leaves her home in the Caribbean to start a new life with her husband and baby in 1950s London. His second novel, A State of Independence (1986), is set in the Caribbean and explores the islands' growing dependency on America. Higher Ground (1989) consists of three narratives linking the lives of a West African slave, a member of the Black Panther movement and a Polish immigrant living in post-war Britain. Cambridge (1991), his fourth novel, is set in the first half of the nineteenth century and centres on the experiences of a young Englishwoman visiting her father's plantation in the Caribbean. The book won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Crossing the River (1993) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It follows the separate stories of two brothers and a sister from slavery to a dislocated emancipation. His most recent novel, The Nature of Blood (1997), draws parallels between the persecution of Jews in Europe and the black victims of slavery.
Caryl Phillips' non-fiction includes a travel narrative, The European Tribe (1987), winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of a journey he made to three vital hubs of the Atlantic slave trade: Liverpool in England, Elmina on the west coast of Ghana, and Charleston in the American South. A New World Order: Selected Essays was published in 2001, and A Distant Shore in 2003, the latter being an exploration of isolation and consolation in an English village.
He is also the editor of Extravagant Strangers (1997), a collection of writings by British writers born outside Britain, including work by Ignatius Sancho, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Selvon and Salman Rushdie, and he wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of V. S. Naipaul's novel The Mystic Masseur, first screened in 2001.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and a Lannan Literary Award in 1994. He has taught at universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the United States, where he was Professor of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts (1994-8). Since 1998 he has been Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000.
Caryl Phillips' book, Dancing in the Dark (2005), a novelisation of the life of Bert Williams, the American entertainer was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His book Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), is about the lives of three black men - Francis Barber, Randolph Turpin and David Oluwale.
His latest novel is In the Falling Snow (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Screenplay, Travel
Bibliography
Strange Fruit (play) Amber Lane Press, 1981
Where There is Darkness (play) Amber Lane Press, 1982
The Shelter (play) Amber Lane Press, 1984
The Final Passage Faber and Faber, 1985
The Wasted Years (play) Methuen, 1985
A State of Independence Faber and Faber, 1986
Playing Away (screenplay) Faber and Faber, 1987
The European Tribe Faber and Faber, 1987
Higher Ground Viking, 1989
Cambridge Bloomsbury, 1991
Crossing the River Bloomsbury, 1993
Extravagant Strangers (editor) Faber and Faber, 1997
The Nature of Blood Faber and Faber, 1997
The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis (editor) Faber and Faber, 1999
The Atlantic Sound Faber and Faber, 2000
A New World Order: Selected Essays Secker & Warburg, 2001
A Distant Shore Secker & Warburg, 2003
Dancing in the Dark Secker & Warburg, 2005
Foreigners: Three English Lives Secker & Warburg, 2007
In the Falling Snow Harvill Secker, 2009
Prizes and awards
1984 Giles Cooper Award The Wasted Years
1985 Malcolm X Prize for Literature The Final Passage
1987 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize The European Tribe
1992 Guggenheim Fellowship
1992 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award Cambridge
1993 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Crossing the River
1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) Crossing the River
1994 Lannan Literary Award (Fiction)
2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Distant Shore
2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Dancing in the Dark
Critical Perspective
Although Phillips is best known today as a novelist, his initial artistic leanings were towards drama. Phillips's first play, Strange Fruit (1981), an allusion to the song by Billie Holliday, centres on a Caribbean family that has lived in Britain for the past twenty years. Followed by Where there is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1984), these plays reveal an early preoccupation with many of the key themes within Phillips's fiction. For example, his attention in Strange Fruit and The Shelter to female characters leads to an exploration of the sexual politics of migration that is also a key concern of the novels. Recently, Phillips has made a notable return to the theatre with his adaptation of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, a history of the slave trade.
Slavery is tangentially alluded to in the title of Phillips's first novel, The Final Passage (1985). The book follows the story of Leila, a young mother and her selfish, unsupportive husband Michael as they travel from the Caribbean to England in the 1950s. At the time of its publication in 1985, the novel broke new ground as the first 'second generation' black British novel to return to the experience of the so-called 'Windrush generation' (the first post-war West Indians to arrive in England on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948). Although Leila's lack of urgency in the novel has been criticised by some, it is by placing a female character at the centre of his narrative, that Phillips manages to disturb the male-centred narratives associated with early settler fictions by the likes of Sam Selvon, George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul. The Final Passage is more than a reference to the ill-fated journey of Leila and her husband Michael, it is also an allusion to the middle passage of the slave trade. Beyond the surface realism of this deceptively simple narrative the reader is confronted with the kind of formal and linguistic experimentation of later work such as Crossing the River (1993). Structured around five sections ('The End', 'Home', 'England', 'The Passage' and 'Winter'), The Final Passage is a disorienting, discontinuous narrative where the beginning is 'The End' and the end suggests a new kind of beginning (for Leila and her child).
The return 'home' that is anticipated at the end of The Final Passage became the subject of Phillips's next novel, A State of Independence (1986). Like Moses, the archetypal character of Selvon's 'London' fictions, Bertram's return to a newly independent Caribbean is not as ideal as he'd hoped. Where The Final Passage closes with Leila poised between England and the Caribbean, A State of Independence ends with Bertram poised between the Caribbean and England. Phillips is a diasporic writer, whose work rejects investment in national belonging, preferring instead the border spaces of the black Atlantic. Even his non-fictional travel books (The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000)) reveal a preoccupation with what Phillips has diagnosed at different moments as 'the gift of displacement' and 'the high anxiety of belonging'.
Arguably his most popular (Booker shortlisted) novel to date, Crossing the River exemplifies the restlessness with which its author is concerned. The novel dramatises the experience of diasporic dislocation by evoking a black Atlantic contact zone at which Africa, America and Europe uneasily encounter one another. Framed by the narrative of an African ancestor, Crossing the River details a series of 'crossings' or journeys. The opening section follows Nash, an emancipated slave, as he travels from America to Liberia and from 'The Pagan Coast to the interior. The second section centres on Martha, whose journey across America has come to a stand still, but whose memories of the past and dreams of the future evoke a series of arrivals and departures. The penultimate section conjures the trade routes of Captain James Hamilton, while in the final section a provincial Yorkshire landscape becomes the unlikely setting for a transatlantic black/white encounter during the war. In its serial accounts of journeying, (not to mention the journeying between journeys that the move from section to section of the novel inaugurate), Crossing the River shares certain similarities with the work of other key diasporic writers of the 1990s, including David Dabydeen and Salman Rushdie. Like Dabydeen, Phillips is interested in how narratives of slavery (also see Higher Ground and Cambridge, which share a similar historical and geographical range to Crossing the River) inform the contemporary migrant condition. Like Rushdie, Phillips is preoccupied by the rhetoric and narrative structure of migration, from the formal dislocations of Crossing the River, to the recurring images of vegetation roots and rootlessness running through his fiction as a whole.
The allegorical qualities of Phillips's carefully crafted prose are most tellingly present in recent fiction, such as The Nature of Blood (1997). This novel centres on the survivor of a Nazi death camp, an enigmatic figure whose tale is entangled with those of others in a narrative that ranges from fifteenth century Venice to present day Israel. Beneath this dark tale of personal suffering and exile is a larger narrative of borderlands, crossings, movements and migrations. A Distant Shore (2003) is his first novel set in the present. The plot, which unfolds in a village in northern England, revolves around the unlikely, enigmatic friendship of a retired white schoolteacher (Dorothy) and an African refugee (Solomon). Solomon’s tragic trajectory in the novel, from the war torn country he flees to his death at the hands of English racists, is unremittingly bleak and has both disturbed and divided readers. There is a journalistic quality to the sections tracing Solomon’s past, and A Distant Shore appears to mark the beginning of a stylistic shift in Phillips’s writing, which increasingly works at the border between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and information. Phillips’s next novel, Dancing in the Dark, 2007 (based on the black African American entertainer Bert Williams, 1974-1922) incorporates newspaper reports. Meanwhile his most recent book, Foreigners (2007), blends fiction, reportage and historical fact to produce a moving account of three black Britons: Francis Barber (a ‘gift’ to Samuel Johnson), Randolph Turpin (a boxing world champion) and David Oluwale (a drifter murdered by the police).
In the introduction to his recent selection of essays and journalism, A New World Order (2001), there is a refrain which is reiterated through the collection as a whole: 'I am of, and not of, this place'. This ambivalent sentence captures the essence of Phillips's work, which is concerned with the tensions between home and the unhomely; between migration and settlement; strangeness and familiarity; arrival and departure. Phillips is a writer who appears most at home when he is away, journeying between places. (The first line of A New World Order contains the assertive statement, 'I have arrived'. But his 'arrival' is at an airport terminal in sub-Saharan Africa). Born in St. Kitts before moving to England, and then to the United States, Phillips is a child of the Diaspora who has remarked that he wishes to be 'buried' in the Atlantic, at the crossroads between Britain, Africa and the Caribbean. Finally, and as the historical range of his writing would seem to suggest, Phillips is a writer who refuses the idea that migration is merely a contemporary condition. In his brilliant edited collection, Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997), Phillips brings together 200 years of writing by 'outsiders' to Britain in a way that reveals the extent to which English literature has been 'shaped and influenced' by those beyond its shores for centuries.
Dr James Procter, 2002
For an in-depth critical review see Caryl Phillips by Helen Thomas (Northcote House, 2003: Writers and their Work Series).
Author statement
'Why do I write? Because it is a way of organizing my feelings about myself and the world around me. Without writing I fear I may metamorphose into something unpleasant. Writing feeds me literally and metaphorically. Writing provides a means by which I can sit in judgement upon myself and reach conclusions (however temporary) that enable me to shuffle towards the next day and another crisis.
And then, of course, there is the technical challenge of writing. To say what I have to say, and to hope to say it in the most incisive manner. To strive towards this goal, and fail honestly, yet continue to strive. To aspire to purify the language; to desire to sharpen the blade of narrative clarity, and then strike quick unseen blows. For me, writing is all of this.
And when (if) the writing no longer comes perhaps the journey will have showered me with enough knowledge so that my spirit can rest peacefully. But I doubt it.'
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Secker & Warburg Ltd
Random House Group Ltd
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8545
Fax: +44 (0)20 7233 6117
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk
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Agent
Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd.
18-21 Cavaye Place
London SW10 9PT
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7373 8672
Fax: +44 (0)20 7373 6002
http://www.aitkenalexander.co.uk
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Related links
http:/ / www.carylphillips.com
http:/ / www.amberlanepress.co.uk
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